


Soul and Body

by Dracoduceus, FaiaHae



Series: Love at First Bite [1]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Blackwatch history, Blackwatch Era, Blackwatch Genji Shimada, Deadlock Gang, Deadlock Jesse McCree, M/M, Magical Tattoos, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-01
Packaged: 2019-08-13 23:50:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16482095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dracoduceus/pseuds/Dracoduceus, https://archiveofourown.org/users/FaiaHae/pseuds/FaiaHae
Summary: If he had a soulmate after everything he had done, he often thought, the revolver must surely be a part of their mark.It took nearly two months for him to notice the mark on his arm but once he did, he knew with a baffling sort of surety exactly when it had bloomed to life on his skin. The moment he had shook the hand of his new commander, Gabriel Reyes, an arrow had formed on his bicep.





	Soul and Body

As a young boy, McCree had been wooed by tales of soulmates. His mother, in one of the few memories he had of her, showed him her markings: braided geometric designs that followed the curves and dips of her spine, wrapped around a hip, and danced down her leg. Many years and innumerable sins later, he saw a serape in a small shop three states over that had a similar pattern. The man was old, perhaps even the appropriate age, and told him in a cracked voice that he had never met his soulmate but the patterns had always brought him peace.   
  
He had told the man of a sad cemetery in the desert of New Mexico and a grave that only one person, a murderer and a vigilante, visited.   
  
The serapes, he bought and wore them as a constant reminder of the ties that bind people together. Time passed as it always did and the next time he visited the lonely grave, he found that another had been placed beside his mother’s. The simple stone that marked his mother’s grave had been replaced with a single slab of granite that covered the heads of both plots. Etched around the edges was the same braided, geometric design that McCree wore on his serapes.   
  
It was bittersweet but still it made him smile to think that they had finally been united. On dark nights when he stared at the soul mark on his bicep, when he searched for answers – and his soulmate – in the bottom of a bottle, he thought of the too lates and too soons and of two graves in the hot desert sun with soulmates that hadn’t met in this life.   
  
Soulmates were your destiny, his mother had said as she painted a picture of a happy future with her hands. They formed when you put your feet on the right path to meet your other half.  
  
As a child, McCree had believed every word she said but as he grew older, he became concerned. For as long as he could remember, she had her mark, that same black braid. She wore the motif in her hair, on her clothes, hoping that someone would notice but children were better than iron fetters and so she had never ventured much further than the edges of town. There she stayed, alone save for Jesse, until she died.  
  
Then came Deadlock.   
  
Soulmates can be made, they told him and showed him their marks, identical tattoos on their left forearms: a leering skull, crossed guns, and the ribbon that bore their name. Why wait for destiny when you can go out and take it?  
  
Thinking of the lonely life of his mother and the soulmate she never met, he reached out and grasped it with both hands. He didn’t look back until it was too late.   
  
But he was smarter than they thought him to be, and more observant. One didn’t become a deadeye if they weren’t observant, after all. He watched them and watched them spiral downward out of control. He watched them grow power-hungry and greedy and draw too much attention to themselves.   
  
While the Deadlocks may know the Gorge, Overwatch was an entirely different matter altogether.   
  
He was offered a deal: join or be locked in jail. Everyone else – what few there had been – that had been given the offer had turned it down.   
  
Good as soulmates, they had sneered, every stupid one of them. _The Deadlocks are my soulmates and I grabbed hold of my destiny rather than wait for it to come to me. They’ll come for me, you wait; you watch. You’ll all be swept away by them._ As if by some clairvoyance, McCree could see in that moment the paths of his future.   
  
The look of shock and betrayal on their faces when McCree had accepted the offer was priceless because unlike them, he knew a dead end when he saw it. It scratched an itch he didn’t know he had to watch them carried away.  
  
They called him names, of course they did. He was a traitor…but also a survivor.   
  
He joined Blackwatch, the part of Overwatch that didn’t exist. He was given clothes and gear but kept his mother’s old revolver, an ancient relic from her trick-riding days. It had a hell of a kick and how such a tiny woman had been able to wield it on the back of a galloping horse and hit every target had always mystified him.   
  
It was a skill that he learned from her. In those moments the world faded away except for him, her Peacekeeper, and the targets. There was no galloping horse, no incoming target, no one else in the world. In that moment, he swore that he could still feel her aiming his hands, holding on to his wrist to absorb the kick. She had always smelled like cinnamon and sun-warmed cotton and he’d say the words she’d cry in her trick-riding shows with her as he looked down the barrel: _it’s high noon – draw!_ __  
  
He used the trick more times than he would want to admit to her spirit and more often than not it saved his team but at what cost to his soul?   
  
If he had a soulmate after everything he had done, he often thought, the revolver must surely be a part of their mark.   
  
It took nearly two months for him to notice the mark on his arm but once he did, he knew with a baffling sort of surety exactly when it had bloomed to life on his skin. The moment he had shook the hand of his new commander, Gabriel Reyes, an arrow had formed on his bicep.   
  
He flexed in the mirror to get a good look at it, late one night in the communal showers where no one would see and tease him. With a regular diet and good exercise, he was filling out like a proper boy his age should.  
  
The mark itself was as simple as his mother’s had been: a single line for the shaft, a pointed shape for the arrowhead, and angled lines for the feathers at the end. It was black, a little jagged at the edges as if whatever ink formed it hadn’t yet reached its boundaries.   
  
He wasn’t (much) ashamed to admit that he cried himself to sleep that night, scared and hopeful that somewhere out there in the great wide world was someone that was meant for him – just for him. Someone that would know him and would be his.   
  
In the morning he was still tentatively hopeful though he let his childish dreams of a happily ever after fade away (just a bit). He trained harder, learned faster, and shot, shot, shot until his eyes and arms burned.   
  
If such a sinner like him was going to have a soulmate, then he better earn it.   
  
His hard work paid off. Ana Amari, known as one of if not the best snipers in the world, took him under her wing. She was quick and wild and if she hadn’t been about old enough to be his mother (and if he didn’t know that he had a soulmate still out there, waiting for him), he’d be in love.   
  
Still, he nursed a very reluctant crush that faded quickly but still burned and crackled like fire whenever she smiled at him. Hero worship was all it really was, but it still hurt something fierce, like he had swallowed a cactus.   
  
Ana Amari taught him and he learned and he became the best sharpshooter in the ranks. From a nobody to a somebody worthy of a hero’s attention and worthy, he privately hoped, of a soulmate. She gave his moment of clarity a name – a joke, but a name nonetheless: Deadeye.   
  
One day, just the two of them in one of her nests at the edge of the longest range, he told her the story of his mother. A tiny little trick-rider that had met a man after her event. He told her about her words, her soul mark, how he swore he could feel her hands on his as he aimed and Ana just listened. She tapped the black tattoo under her eye, just once, and he knew that she understood.   
  
They didn’t talk about Deadeye after that, and Ana would accompany him to the range more often than not because Deadeye was a way to feel his mother again and a recruit alone at the range was strange enough to report; Ana’s presence as a trainer implied that she was punishing him or training him even harder. After that he felt a deeper kind of kindred with Ana that they never discussed. He could never call her “mother”, but a few times she looked like she heard the words anyway.   
  
Sometime into his…career with Blackwatch, he was sent to Japan with a covert ops team to investigate a prominent yakuza clan - and an attached coven of vampires - after they received tips from an anonymous source. The source was well-seated within the family and could provide them with more information than what the usual grunts could feed.   
  
They were to make contact with the source, gain what knowledge they could, and be as much of a thorn in the side of the Shimada Clan as they could until a formal task force could be mobilized. If they could, they were also to investigate the coven and gain information on their strengths and...eating habits.  
  
Their informant was a surprisingly cheerful young man around Jesse’s age, with vibrant green hair. Despite such an obvious feature, he moved like a ninja. Their personas undercover were that Jesse was the boy’s American penpal and they were seeing the sights together.   
  
The boy’s name was Genji Shimada and he was the second son of the current yakuza leader.   
  
They became friends of sorts, and spent their days wandering Hanamura. Genji (codename Sparrow over official channels) fed him information while they played at being tourists and the dutiful tour guide. One night while drinking, they revealed their soul marks to each other. Genji’s were ornate spheres around his neck like enormous mala and he said that they began forming when he decided to feed intel to Overwatch.   
  
Genji’s face lit up when he saw Jesse’s tattoo. It had changed since he had last looked at it: a stone arrowhead, brown and white-striped feathers, and a swirling helix of blue. “I know who that is,” he said brightly and with a teasing smirk, refused to tell him more. They mock-wrestled as Jesse pretended to interrogate him and Genji had only laughed, admitting that Jesse’s soulmate had the coldest heart that Genji had ever met.  
  
As time passed, he’d feed him other details as well, but they were few and far between, as if Genji were trying to protect him. Jesse didn’t call him out on it and they existed in a strange sort of stalemate over it.   
  
The mission continued.   
  
It wasn’t easy, of course it wasn’t – there was something very wrong if it was – but it was almost…easy to be lulled into a false sense of security. To forget that he was working with the yakuza.  
  
One night, Jesse found Genji in a dark alleyway. He would have thought that the informant was dead, there was so much blood. But the man had gasped a pained breath and Jesse called in the medics.   
  
In the end they hadn’t been able to bring down the Shimada Clan, but they gained a new operative. Gabe was pissed, but only because he had Overwatch and Jack Morrison breathing down his neck for not bringing down such an insidious __yakuza clan. Gabriel’s real anger had a name and a body count, and Genji Shimada took to Blackwatch like a fish to the neverending expanse of the ocean. It was months of painful recovery before Jesse even recognized his friend in the angry shell Mercy had left behind, months more before he and Genji could sit together and talk - if not quite like they used to, then close. And then Genji finally broke, one night when Jesse was in the medical wing with a neck brace. He tapped McCree’s shoulder where the arrow was hidden.

“Look at it again.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Look at it.” Genji repeated.

McCree let out a huff of air. “Yer’ gonna have to take a photo. I can’t quite get my head at the right angle-”

“Lift.”

McCree yielded, a sense of dread curling in his gut. Genji looked for a long moment before he snapped the photo.

He took a moment to look at it, and Jesse’s stomach twisted. He knew enough to guess where this was going. Dragons. A man from Genji’s old life. Nothing good. 

Genji finally offered his phone.

“My brother is a changed man.”

Something about the intonation was...odd. Genji didn’t sound angry, just...lost. McCree waited for the pain, waited for the betrayal. His soulmate had tried to murder his best friend. He ought to feel something.

Resignation.

He remembered soulmate marks turned to skulls. He remembered men who were destined only for the grave. 

_ My brother is a changed man. _

McCree was scared he was going to see a skull in the picture - a loss he would never truly understand. Two graves.

He didn’t.

The arrow wasn’t stone and wood anymore - it was a sleek carbon fiber. It-

Well. It looked damn familiar.

“Genji, is this-?”

“Russian black-market tech? Yes.”

Jesse couldn’t wrench his eyes away from the picture - two coiled dragons around an arrow, a brighter and more electric shade then they’d been before. One’s mouth was open in a roar - defiance. Anger. Grief.

The Russian tech. It wasn’t the arms sold to the Shimada clan - in fact, the Shimadas and the Russians got along famously badly. This was tech sold to mercenaries. Not even the Deadlocks had this tech - the Russians weren’t interested in big commercial venue with niche weapons. Arrows, sniper rifles with nanotechnology, sleep darts. They were weapons only a few could use. They were an assassins weapons. 

McCree wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. But - change. It meant change. Coming soon. Somewhere in his gut, Jesse was sure that things were about to change.    



End file.
